The manitou by Graham Masterton

possessed of real magical strength.”
    I lit a
cigarette myself and thought for a moment. “Did you say magical?” I asked Amelia.
    “Sure. Any
spirit with that kind of control over itself would have to be the spirit of
somebody who knew about the occult when they were alive. It might even be a
person who’s still living today, and is able to float around as a spirit when
they’re asleep. It has been known.”
    “Sounds like
bullshit t’me,” said MacArthur. “If I was Mrs. Karmann, I’d take that table
back and complain.”
    I grinned. It
was good to have a real skeptic around, even if he wasn’t helping us much.
    “Amelia,” I
said. “If you’re saying that what we saw tonight was the spirit of someone
magical, then there’s an interesting tie-in. I was reading my Tarot cards the
other evening, and I kept coming up with The Magician. No matter how I dealt or
redealt them, I always ended up with the same card.”
    Amelia brushed
her long brown hair away from her eyes. “In that case, I guess it’s fair to
suppose that whoever is doing this, whether they’re alive or dead, is a
magician. Or somebody like a magician.”
    “Witch doctor?”
suggested MacArthur.
    “Could be. I mean, he looked like some kind of African. Not
just because the wood was black, but because of his lips,
remember ?”
    Mrs. Karmann
sat up, clutching her glass of brandy. “Well, I’ll tell you what he reminded me
of,”
    she said weakly. “He reminded me of a cigar-store Indian.”
    MacArthur
snapped his fingers. “That’s it – Indian. The hooked nose,
right, and the lips, and the high cheekbones. He’s not a witch doctor,
he’s a medicine man!”
    Amelia
brightened up. “Listen,” she said. “I have quite a few books on Indians. Why
don’t we go back to my place and see what we can find out about medicine men?
Mrs. Karmann, do you think you’ll be all right now?”
    “Oh, you go
ahead,” said the old lady. “I’ll stay across the hall with my neighbor Mrs.
Routledge, and Karen’s parents will be here later. If you think that any of
this can help poor Karen, then the sooner you get going the better.”
    “Mrs. Karmann,”
said Amelia, “you’re an angel.”
    “Not yet a
while, I hope,” smiled Mrs. Karmann. “Not yet a while.”
    Back in the
untidy jumble of Amelia’s apartment in the Village, surrounded by books and
magazines and tapestries and pictures and old hats and half a bicycle, we went
through a dozen volumes on Indian lore. Surprisingly, there wasn’t much about
medicine men, apart from stuff on buffalo magic and rain dances and battle
spells. Out of the eleven books, nothing gave us any clues about the wooden
death mask on Mrs. Karmann’s table.
    “Maybe we’re
totally mistaken,” said Amelia. “Perhaps the spirit is somebody living today. I
mean, a hooked nose doesn’t have to be Indian. It could be Jewish.”
    “Wait a
minute,” I told her. “Have you any other history books, or anything at all that
might contain a cross reference to Indians or medicine men?”
    Amelia scuffled
through a couple of heaps of books, and came up with a history of early
settlements in the United States, and the first volume of a three-volume study
of New York. I went to the indexes and looked up Indians. The book on early
settlements contained nothing more than the usual generalizations about Indian
civilization. In those early days people were more in the mood for
land-grabbing than studying the indigenous culture of the natives. But the book
on New York had an illustration which gave me the biggest break I’d had since
I’d found Karen Tandy’s nightmare ship in the library.
    I’d seen the
drawing before – in school books and history books – but it was only when I
came across it that night in Amelia Crusoe’s apartment that I realized just
what its implications were. It was a sketchy engraving of the tip of an island.
On the shore was a small cluster of houses, windmill, and a high-walled fort